When I say tradition, I don’t mean pews and organs and choir robes and classical music. Those things are once exalted pop-cultural markers, like today’s video projectors and podcasts. Tradition goes to the heart of the faith. Traditionalism is different from tradition. Traditionalism is when we worship the traditions as though maintaining them is the whole point of the faith. That’s really a form of ancestor worship. To borrow the words of Jaroslav Pelikan, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”
